There was a time Saturday night when the only thing keeping me at the Newport was the mantra: “The tickets were free, The Lantern is paying. The tickets were free, The Lantern is paying.”
It’s amazing how typecasted bands like Watershed have become, how simple their songs and how canned their stage antics. That may be the great indie-rock irony — bands who have independent record deals have fallen into even worse ruts than bands on major labels.
Power-pop quartets have fallen victim to the doldrums of alternative simplicity and uncreativity; it has become so commonplace that it has become easy to ignore. I could sit and write about each song and throw in clever adjectives, likening the sound to another band you have already heard or personifying it in some way to make the guitar riffs and vocals easier to capture. But if the show said anything, or meant anything, it wasn’t about rock ‘n’ roll, even though both the opening band and Watershed themselves seemed so bent on claiming they were part of that special world.
What was important wasn’t whether the music was good or bad, but how desperate everyone there seemed to latch on to something that spoke to their problems. Watershed thrived on songs discussing everyday life and how it can wear on someone to the breaking point. It was no secret — on stage or in the crowd — that the whole system of profession, partner and place is having less relevance for people’s lives. There is an immediate desperation for more easy release in songs that deal with the failure of these issues, if only superficially and in ways that have been driven into the ground decades before.
True, music has always offered release. It has always helped soothe, heal, and forget problems. But it was painfully obvious, as the businessmen, housewives and students yearned for song after song, that the whole normal, unhip daytime world must have so little to offer — must be so frustrating — that a band working out problems of bad jobs and breakups in methods made stale years ago can still make it big.
The market is big for people singing to others who latch onto some watered-down rock ‘n’ roll dream and try to drink and dance away all the things they are forced to suffer through and support by day.
Watershed seems to be reaping all the benefits. Maybe the dreams of rock glory have become too accessible, since they have become available to the point where anyone with a couple of amps and a handful of power chords can start a band.
True, that pattern has been in place for decades, but the energy that fueled that pattern in the past and made it great before was sadly absent Saturday night. The music was so basic that it sounded like something I had heard before and didn’t bother to ask anyone what it was. The songs sounded the same: a bizarre mixture of pop, Blink-182, grunge and the Gin Blossoms.
But though the music was weak to me and the energy lacking, the strength of Watershed seems to lie elsewhere. Though I’d like to see it done, the band has no duty to break any musical barriers, nor sound completely fresh.
They aren’t writing for me, and in the sense of goals, they seem to be accomplishing just what they need to. I’ve tried to write a song, and I know how hard they are to write, especially one that people can actually forget their problems and dance to when they hear it. And the people at the Newport — people of all ages, trades and backgrounds — did just that, danced all night, seeming ecstatic.
Maybe that’s all music needs to do.
